I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Ascension Delayed

The Ascension expansion – there’s so much in this update
that it certainly deserves the title, compared to “update” – as been delayed by
a week to November 15. From those who have been testing out some of the new
features on Sisi, it sounds like there are still plenty of bugs to work out,
but I’m not certain which yet.

So, alpha clones won’t hit for an extra week. An extra week
for corporations to prepare, PLEX prices to rise, the injector market to get
ready for a sudden increase in demand, and CCP marketing to fret over the level
of success they can expect.

Will alpha clones cause an influx of players? Even two weeks
before launch, I still can’t say. To read Reddit, a lot of players are
intrigued by the possibilities. Will that translate into an actual increase of
players in game? And if so, how many?

I’ve seen a number of screenshots of CCP trying its best to
push players to Omega status at every possible opportunity, and I can imagine
that will become tiresome after a while. How much of that will players endure
before they start to feel annoyed? And, leaving alone the user interface issue,
will single-race limited gameplay be engaging enough to keep people either
logging in long term or making the jump to omega status?

At the same time, CCP is set to launch industrial citadels
as well. That alone would be a huge sea-change for an expansion. At the moment,
industrial citadels seem to leave the small-scale industrialist in a lurch,
with the cost of the smallest citadel is going to be over five times the cost
of a POS equivalent, and that represents a much larger risk.

I’ve often thought we need a deployable industrial option
similar to a mobile depot for pop-up industrial options. Sure, put whatever
limitations you’d like on them, but right now, a billion isk to set up an
attackable asset for an industrial corp really isn’t a comparable option. I
suspect we could see a whole industry develop around wardeccing industrial
corps for their shiny citadel killmails.

Yet, something else strikes me. I wonder at the timing. We
have alpha clones and industrial structures happening simultaneously, both of
which will be hugely transformative to the game. Given their importance and the
impact they’ll (likely) have on the game, less-than-two months’ advance warning
really isn’t very much at all.

Why shove them both into the same expansion? On the one
hand, maybe it’s simply a desire to provide something big and new (industrial
arrays) to provide a reason for lapsed players to log back in – particularly
something for non-PvPers after years of PvP-heavy content.

But what if it’s something more? CCP is working on replacing
player activity with NPC mining fleets, effectively populating New Eden with
surrogate players that other players can interact with. Alpha clones is a tacit
recognition that having a player in the game for free is better than not
logging in at all, due to the benefits to other, paying customers.

It’s pretty clear that CCP wants more activity in-game, and
they want it NOW. If there’s a product strategy document being passed around
CCP headquarters, “Increase concurrent logins” is high on their priority list.

Ascension is clearly meant to generate a lot of buzz and
appeal to a wide audience, and it’s looking to be the biggest update for the
past several months, at least since the launch of Citadel, and I’d argue even
larger than that because of alpha clones. Rather than wait and split off
industrial arrays, CCP is doing everything possible to load November 15 with as
much meaningful content as possible.

That’s either deeply troubling about the player trend
projections being passed around CCP HQ, or reassuring in regards to the extent
CCP is willing to go to correct for player count.

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